Mission Impossible? In Search of Conservative Rap At CPAC (VIDEO)

By Evan McMorris-Santoro

February 19, 2010 9:18 am

Last night, I hung around the hotel where CPAC is being held for far longer than any reporter should. People like to believe their journalists have lives, and sitting in the corner of a hotel bar mingling with future conservative politicians in various states of of inebriation tends to make it hard to keep up that illusion. But I was on a mission: At 11 p.m. I was going to be front-and-center to witness a “Music Jam” (you know, for the kids) featuring not one, but two conservative rappers.

After listening to hours of speeches, and grabbing handfuls of conservaswag, the conservative youth at CPAC were going to let their crew-cut hair down and boogie. There was no way I was going to miss that. There’s only thing I didn’t plan for — conservatives, it seems, don’t care about rap.Here’s what it looked like inside the site of the rap show:

A few CPACers eventually walked in, looking for rap. They seemed bewildered. No one canceled the show officially, and no one knew what was going on. (For those unfamiliar with CPAC, let me tell you how rare that is. This conference usually goes off with military precision; people are where they are supposed to be according to the schedule.)

We hung around for a while, hoping for some hear some phat rhymes from headliner Hi Caliber, the tea partier rapper we profiled last year. He never showed.

I caught up with Hi Cal this afternoon to find out what happened. “The crowd disbanded early,” he said, “so we moved the show.”

The new performance will be tonight “after Ann Coulter,” he said.

Maybe it was the rap that turned people off. Maybe it was the fact the event was hosted by “XPAC,” the teen-focused co-conference featuring rows of video games and bowls of Tootsie Rolls. Maybe it was the fact that it was a dry event on a night where conservative-funded free booze flowed like water all across the city.

It wasn’t a total loss, though — I did snag some Tootsie Rolls on the way out.